Roses & Raspberries

U-T San Diego Editorial Staff

A ‘Rising to the Top’ rose

A rose goes to the Carlsbad City Council for promoting John Coates to city manager. Coates is a smart, diligent professional with more than 30 years of municipal experience. He joined Carlsbad in January 2010 and served as Parks and Recreation Director and then Assistant City Manager until Lisa Hildebrand’s exit last November, when he was put into the top spot on an interim basis.

Coates knows the rules and he knows the ropes. He’s been put in charge of a city where the mayor and council have a clear-set agenda – and one of their goals is to keep a wary eye on the economy and cut as much fat from city government as possible, just in case things go south again.

Coates is the right guy for the job, a strong leader who shares the mayor and council’s vision and has the ability as well as the fortitude to do what’s best for the city and the citizens of Carlsbad.

Expect to see him take off running, with no detours or slackening of the pace.

A ‘Stuck in Traffic Blues’ razz

A raspberry to that much-maligned east-west trail of tears known as state Route 78, which for the fourth consecutive year tops our annual list of the county’s worst bottlenecks with that little spot of hell known as the Barham Backup. A U-T San Diego analysis of traffic data indicates motorists can expect delays on the 4.4-mile stretch of eastbound 78, leading up to the Barham Drive exit, a whopping 96.8 percent of rush-hour workdays.

And while relief could come once new merging lanes through San Marcos open in April, we’re not going to hold our breath. A massive $106 billion transportation plan, approved by SANDAG in October 2011, calls for two new carpool lanes on the 78 between Oceanside and Escondido, but that’s not slated to happen until 2020 (and given our chronic budget woes, who knows if that date is realistic).

In the meantime, as they say, it is what it is.

As an MIT study said, “SR-78 has reached full-capacity and it is neither financially nor physically possible to expand it.... ”

That, by the way, was from the spring of 2003.

A ‘Ridin’ the Rails’ rose

A rose, not yet fully bloomed, to the Sprinter, which celebrates its fifth anniversary this month. The light rail system, operated by the North County Transit District, operates along a 22-mile route from Oceanside to Escondido, stopping at 15 stations along the way. Ridership still isn’t what it could be, but it’s picking up.

According to the latest figures we’ve seen, boardings on the snazzy blue-and-green trains reached 890,394 in the first 10 months of 2012 – a 3.7 percent bump over the same period in 2011, according to the North County Transit District. The increase follows even bigger gains in 2011, when Sprinter boardings rose 17.7 percent from the prior year.

When the Sprinter opened in March 2008, transit officials predicted an average of 11,000 daily boardings within a year. In reality, it took average weekday ridership until the 2012 fiscal year to reach 7,820, up from 7,282 the year before.